LAND TENURE.

"And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." - LEVITICUS XXV. 10-13.

ALL men ultimately get their living out of the soil. There seems to be a recognition of this in that inexhaustible storehouse of fundamental truths, -the first chapters of Genesis. Man is placed in a garden to till it and to eat its fruits. He has no other way of living, and will never have any other. There never will be a process by which the original elements that enter into food will be manufactured into food. We may fly in the air, or travel around the earth with the sun, but we shall never take the unorganized substances that form grass and grain and the flesh of animals, and directly convert them into food; they must first be organized into vital forms. There seems to be in this process a hint of the eternal truth that life proceeds only from life.

Hence, questions pertaining to land are the most imperative that come before men, because the first and most constant question with every man is, How shall I live, how get my daily bread? All other questions pertaining to life or condition come

after this one. He may be free or enslaved, he may live in a city or on the sea, he may be educated or left ignorant, but first of all he must have food, and food, first or last, comes out of the ground. Every human being must have some real relation to a certain extent of soil. The relation may be an indirect one; he may never see his estate, he may live in a city and not know the grain that yields his loaf, but somewhere there is a certain stretch of land that stands for that man's life. Fifteen square feet, it is said, will furnish a Hawaiian enough to support existence; the Indian requires miles of hunting ground; the Belgian farmer lives. well on two or three acres; here in New England we require many. But the main point is the imperativeness of the relation. Commerce, manufac- tures, schools, churches, government even, all these represent no such necessity as an open relation to the soil. You may burn all the ships, factories, churches, school-houses, annihilate government, and man still lives, but cut him off from the soil, and in a week he is dead.

I say this to explain the force of land questions, their interest to thinking minds, their place in history, and in political and divine economy, which, however, are one thing. To get man rightly related to the soil, in such a way that he shall most easily get his food from it, this is the underlying question of all history, its keynote and largest achievement. The chief struggles in all ages and nations have turned upon this relation. For a hundred years Roman history was colored by struggles

over the agrarian laws, the patricians claiming the lands of Italy for their own, the people and the great conquerors claiming them for themselves and the disbanded armies; these struggles were the basis of Cæsar's fortunes. It was the apportionment of the lands of England by William the Conqueror to his followers, that laid the foundation of those conflicts between the nobility or land-owners and the people, that have never ceased, and that are to-day at white heat; questions in which there is technical justice on one side and eternal righteousness on the other. Why should not the Duke of Buccleugh own land over which he can ride thirty miles in a straight line, with a title good for nigh a thousand years? Why, again, should one man hold land from which thousands of people, on or near it, who are well-nigh starving, could get their bread? I do not attempt to answer these questions, because they are complicated and do not admit of brief answer, but the recent landact of Mr. Gladstone shows how a great, philosophical statesman regards them, "marshaling the way they are going. The Code of Napoleon, which took the great estates of France, and even all landed possessions, and made them subject to division on inheritance, showed the same broad sense of human justice, with perhaps some lack of forecast.

There are two forces at work in the matter, both proceeding out of what seems almost an instinct for ownership of the soil. The earth is our mother, and she woos us perpetually to herself. To own some spot of land, and be able to say, "this is

mine," is one of the sweetest of personal feelings; it declares our kinship with this natural world that nurses our life and upholds our feet. There is a sort of pathos always felt when one speaks of owning a burial lot, a slight, tender satisfaction, as if it were fit that one should himself own the spot of earth where his earth-fed body is to be resolved into the elements. And thus it was that Abraham, though he was to have no country here, but only a heavenly one, still was suffered to call his own the cave where he buried his dead; so dear and natural a satisfaction was not to be withheld.

These two forces that draw men to the soil are, first, a natural, almost instinctive sense of keeping close to the source of life, as a wise general does not allow himself to be separated from his supplies. This is broad, every-day, common-sense. When a people are shut off from the soil, or denied ownership of it; when it is held by a few and farmed out even at low rents; when land is held in such a way that it no longer answers its end of feeding the people, but is kept for parks and forests and hunting grounds, there will be restiveness, complaint, and resistance, coupled with a defective life of the nation and of the family. Back of all claims of inheritance, above all laws, and deeper down than technical justice, is the ineradicable conviction that the soil is for the people simply because they live out of the soil; and it is a simple corollary that the living should be as easily got, and as generous as possible. The main reason why we have an annual immigration of over a quarter of a million from

Europe is that land can be owned here, while there it can only be rented. And this emigration is the reason why Europe is saved from agrarian revolutions, and the few are left in possession of the land. The injustice of ages lingers because there is an outlet for human indignation.

The other force is the pride and greed and love of power of the strong. Here is a triple-woven force out of which has sprung by far the greater part of the injustice and oppression that have afflicted the race. There is no pride so natural and persistent as pride in extensive ownership of land. It is figured in the temptation of the Christ, to whom was shown all the kingdoms of the earth. To climb a hill or tower, and say, "I own all I see," this is merely the topmost reach of selfsatisfaction. It is simply the broadest possible reflection to the man of his own importance. To own the earth, — that which feeds man and upholds him, that which endures while the generations flit across its surface, that whereon is wrought the perpetual mystery of growth, the arena of the unfailing goodness, the promise-covered and promisekeeping earth, this is the most philosophic and well-nigh noblest form of human pride. It is innocent when it does not invade the just rights of others; when it does not forget that the earth is the common property of humanity, on the simple ground that it is necessary to its life.1 But, in

1 I hardly need say that I do not here intimate any theory of Communism, or of arbitrary distribution of the soil, nor even in what the right consists by which any man holds a particular portion of land. I